Terrorism: Locking up suspects without trials

Should the government have the power to lock up anyone it accuses of terrorism—without charges or a trial? That Soviet-style justice may soon become “a permanent part of the American way,” said Andrew Rosenthal in NYTimes.com. The Senate voted last week to require anyone suspected of plotting terrorist attacks against the U.S.—on or off American soil—to be detained indefinitely, without trial, by the military. The National Defense Authorization Act effectively takes the FBI and federal courts out of the picture, and hands “the business of interrogating, charging, and trying suspected terrorists” solely to the military. So much for the U.S. Constitution, said Spencer Ackerman in Wired.com. Even if accused terrorists are U.S. citizens or legal residents, the Senate bill—which now must be reconciled with a similar bill passed by the House—would abrogate the right to a fair trial “until the end of hostilities.” The hostilities in the war on terrorism, of course, will “end the Wednesday after never.”

Critics of military detention forget that “we are at war,” said Adam Paul Laxalt and Ron DeSantis in NationalReview.com. The Islamic jihadists who wish to destroy the U.S. should be treated as enemy combatants, not criminal suspects subject to domestic laws and constitutional rights. The civilian courts aren’t designed to process terrorists detained during wartime, and will surely end up releasing some of them on legal technicalities. The result: more dead Americans here and abroad. As for the rare U.S. citizen who betrays his country, said Andrew C. McCarthy, also in National​Review.com, the courts have long permitted the president, during wartime, to treat traitors as enemies of the state. During the Civil War, President Lincoln did not give captured Confederate soldiers trials; he locked them up until the war was over.

The bill’s apologists are acting “as if the smoke were still rising from the ruins of the fallen World Trade Center towers,” said The Philadelphia Inquirer in an editorial. But 9/11 was over a decade ago. Osama bin Laden is dead, al Qaida’s leadership is in tatters, and soldiers are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Surely now is the time to return to the human-rights standards we gave up after 9/11, rather than write our excesses into law. President Obama has threatened to veto this bill, and he must. “Even amid the threat from al Qaida, core freedoms must prevail.”

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